Is that DRM could conceivably used to enforce free software or to even have a system where an open source environment could actually pay its developers.
For example, if I were building a project, I could pay like $5 or something and download "printf" from another developer, $5 for a cool strcpy, and so on, and stitch together solutions on a per source file basis.
With each source file protected by DRM, I could theoretically use them as needed and the authors could actually get paid. The software would be open, that is, everyone could see the source. It would be free, that is, anyone could use it or modify it, but it would not be free as in beer.
I think the OSS community needs to rethink some of its hostility to DRM, because in DRM lies the keys to getting Developers paid all of the revenue from the products, and not shareholders.
The money you are spending for Oracle in the above case gets you some features that SQL Server flat out doesn't have. Like all things, you do have to know what you are doing with Oracle, but, if you do, you get some features that make or break a big, big application.
uber partioned indexes uber materialized views outstanding mvcc transaction support
SQL Server 2005 is supposed to have some of these features in it, plus the kitchen sink, but then I would expect the price to move on that.
The other thing is that with Microsoft you generally are going to spend an extra $2000 / developer for tools.
If Google ever releases an operating system, it will be after they use their extremely powerful search engine leverage to drive an entirely new class of applications that make Microsoft's stuff seem quaint.
Office applications are commodities and so are operating systems. All Google has to do is keep supporting the web and they will become the primary application of it. Sitting on top of all of that personal content, all of that information, and doling it out to consumers, they can just keep marching ever forward. They have M$ over a barrel because if Microsoft ever -broke- compatibility with google, their own fan base would erupt and switch to a browser that didn't break google, crippling M$ strategy all together.
Let Microsoft have the operating system. By the time Google is done with them, a Windows that has to be priced ever and ever cheaper to compete with every other clone that can at least run google is all that Microsoft will have left.
No I was just pissed off when I wrote that because I was frustrated that people could not agree that the idea of getting rid of dictators as American foreign policy was a good one. When I was a kid, the left wing was all about getting rid of dictators, and now they prefer the status quo right at the same time as I've bought into the idea.
Ok batman, here's the point you miss. Science is a tool to discover and share knowledge about the real world. Therefor, it has two components, it has knowledge, and it has the real world.
For the real world to be satisfied, science must interact with it.
For the knowledge to be satisfied, it must be shareable with others.
For this reason, we combine the two requirements into a single principal - we test something about the real world, in such a way as that someone else can repeat the same test and get the same result. This way, the knowledge can be communicated, a real world result is achieved, illustrating that knowledge, and multiple people can get the same result given the same test, illustrating not only the truth of the matter but also that the communications itself is valid.
Thus, experiment against the real world is what science is about.
The whole foundation of this method occurred because once upon a time many people felt that all knowledge could be inferred, by process of logical reasoning, against the known works of the ancients. There was no need to test things themselves, because, if the logic was sound, therefor, the fact must be true. Jonathan Swift, in his famous Battle of the Books, argued this point, ultimately on the losing end. Galileo wrestled with this in his little "play" that got him into so much trouble with the Church. Newton in some ways arguably put it all together with Optiks - not only did he come up with the math to explain things - he also had the novel idea of checking his math with actual experiments. Soon, other people did that as well.
Experiment is everything. We don't teach kids to measure the temperature of boiling water just to verify that water boils at 100C. No, we do that and many other experiments because we inculcate our children with the idea that if there is a fact presented to you, then, you should be able to check it or test it yourself, otherwise, you can freely reject it.
So.. if you can't check it, or at least, trust in someone who can check it, argubably, it isn't a fact. So, we can say that yes, evolution of bacteria or fruitflies is a fact, and from that we infer that man evolved - but, that does not make the evolution of man a fact, only a good inference, because we have no test that we can repeatedly evolve a man.
There is absolutely nothing religious about this argument. As I said before, I reject so called Intelligent Design and creationism because it too cannot be tested. All I am saying is, science should not mix fact and inference. Because, there is NO FACT OF SCIENCE THAT HAS EVER BEEN WRONG. Only the inferences have been wrong. Newton wasn't somehow wrong and then corrected by Einstein. Newton was entirely right within the domain of where his math applied. Einstein was not wrong and then corrected by quantum mechanics, Einstein is a FACT within a certain domain.
It's like, in a computer program,
if (a 10) use_new_theory
there's nothing WRONG with the old theory. The fact is still perfectly FACT for a 10 that is wrong.
Maybe this is not science to you or to anyone else, but this is a lot clearer of a message than any of the mishmash (oh we got our facts wrong before) gobbleygook that you lay on the public. Science is never wrong. Only inferences about known facts are.
Adhere to that message, and maybe you can stop the flood of ignorance of the bible and national enquirer from replacing really verifiable facts.
The scientific method means test and reproducable results. Anything less is not the scientific method. You are the one that wants to open the floodgates of inference and allow nonfact to pollute the knowledge base.
Now you are just mixing arguments. You can test the standard model's theory of gravity. Until that time, the cause of gravity is anybodies guess. At some point, we -will- test the standard model's theory of gravity. Until that time, it is not a fact. Just an inference.
Sorry that you can't see the difference between making stuff up and not making stuff up.
The irony is that a lot of VB6 developers are extremely pissed off about VB.NET as a migration path. If Linux actually had a VB6, a lot of VB developers would probably jump ship.
Windows NT from the get go has always had this notion of various subsystems that can sit on top of the raw OS layer. It is most common to use the Windows subsystem but there was for a time a POSIX subsystem and an OS/2 subsystem so that applications written to either could run under Windows. Over time maintenance of these subsystems was abandoned but I read somewhere that the next go around of Windows is going to have a fully compliant POSIX subsystem.
All of the OEMS bundling windows on their PC's will get the new version of Windows automatically. It's interesting that the areas where Vista is going is where Mac has gained something of a foothold and where Linux is weakest - in 3d desktops.
If the standard model says that gravity is caused by the exchange of gravitons, then we can build a big enough particle accelerator to go look for them.
I guess you are too big of a wimp to be a scientist.
>evolution and directed his agricultural ministry to >ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution.
That's actually not true. Stalin cut off the food to parts of his country friendly to the white russians to kill off political opposition. Everything else he made up to cover his tracks, even the crap about Lamarckian whatever.
And to think you posted that with a device that is arguably high technology
Yes, that is based on test, actual experiment, and reproducable results. Computers are real science, real fact.
Newsflash. The same people that don't like evolution only like physics when it can be used to attack evolution
I can't help it if they are idiots. My whole point is that the sales pitch science as a product is flawed because it presently treats inference as fact and thus, because it says its "facts are wrong", causes people to incorrectly invalidate the whole lot.
All of science can be distilled as a collection of data points. Assume that for a given domain, we have two points. Mathematically speaking, we know that there are an infinite number of functions that can satisfy those two points. A model in science attempts to predict what is in between those points and quite often that model is flawed or wrong because it guesses incorrectly.
So, when we say we know something, we need to be clear and communicate that we only those two points as fact, and that we INFER that a function of those two points which we can test. But at the end of the day, the only thing we know as fact will be those two points, and each new point we test will be just one more fact.
expect scientists to be some sort of infallible priesthood
Scientists sell themselves as that. And they aren't, and people are learning that, and they are wrongly dismissing all of it as crap.
You can show things that reproduce really fast evolving
Of course you can. And you can make new products by tinkering with genomes. That's a data point for you. But it is still an inference to say that people evolved from apes (which I think we did), not a fact.
Facts are things you can reproduce. Anything else is inference. Because science mixes the two in its public message, people throw out both, incorrectly.
Really, if you view the human enterprise of science as a sort of a brute force search algorithm of the unknown, one might think that we would teach people all sorts of random but curve fitting models so that they will think about things differently so problems can be approached in parallel from many different angles at once. Paradoxically, to even teach everyone the same models might actually be slowing down scientific progress for new and better models.
But au contraire, we have a public body that demands political action be taken in defense of one or more results that may be flat out wrong.
If you want to make actionable law out of what you do, be right, otherwise, don't bother us.
Quantum physics is speculative, but you don't seem to be throwing your computer out the window.
Don't go linking evolution to quantum physics. Quantum physics built me a computer. I've yet to see an evolutionary biologist create a planet out of dust and produce a human being.
Dead wrong.
Completely true. Name me one consumer good produced by evolution? I can name thousands produced by physics.
I can show a progression of hominid fossils leading to homo sapien sapien
And so what? Theoretically I could write a computer program that ties together every known fact of evolutionary theory and creates an infinite number of internally consistent systems around those facts. You cannot predict with your rocks, cannot repeat any steps, cannot test your ideas by repetition and cannot prove anything.
You will never amount to anything more than a glorified technician
And you'll never be a scientist, only a slave to inference. TEST. TEST. TEST. REPRODUCIBLE RESULTS. That is science.
I'm not by any stretch an ID guy or a creationist whack job, but I'm sick of people polluting science with politically motivated and untestable ideas. If you cannot test something, it is not a fact. Period, end of story.
The real point is, in the eyes of the common man, science is a brand of information, just like Walmart is a brand for stores or Nike is a brand for shoes, and the brand is taking a beating.
Here's the attitude.
"you want someone to believe human origins from a set of people that told me I would die if I smoked and ate a cheeseburger and I'm still living."
"well now basically you are just making up evolution to fit your story together. Well I can do that too. Can't test it either way, can we..."
In other words, if the best a scientist can tell you today is that, he might be wrong tomorrow, why even bother listening to him?
So you can use science for real things, like physics and design of military weapons and consumer goods, but the rest of it is so much speculative nonsense.
The consequences of guessing wrong about the origin of humanity are completely immaterial to most people's lives. You can't show people evolving any more than someone else can show God making something. It's immaterial, unprovable, and so why fight over it?
Yeah you can roll out the eliptical argument that evolution is somehow necessary for medicine but most doctors are concerned with the human species, here and now, and now plants and people are related. To wit, you can get a Chem E degree and still get into Med School.
Everything that science has to offer is not just based on a logical syllogism, it is also based on scientists having a squeakier clean reputation than preachers.
You can argue falsifibility all you want, but, that does shoot science in a whole. Evolution, for all practical purposes, is not falsifiable. You can't set the initial conditions of the earth, have a control planet, wait 4 billion years, and get the same result according to a mathematical formula.
Global Warming is also practically non-falsifiable. You can't have a control earth and a current earth, in the same orbit, and then alter the CO2 level and see what happens...
Anything that is not provable by immediate experiment is thus speculation at best. It may be informed speculation, it may be internally consistent speculation, but until you demonstrate your system by corporate like repetition, you don't have science.
I built an AJAX like form back in the day. I used JavaScript to drive MSXML inside of a web page coupled with innerhtml to create a client side application with tabs, list views and other editing.
The problems were rife.
First off, nobody renders HTML entirely correctly and even HTML has limitations in how it sizes things. How do you draw a line in HTML? Jeez, I wonder. You might be tempted to assemble HTML tags into a kind of a windows control, but there's no architecture for the focus. Then, you have to deal with the fact that the browser itself really has no idea what you are trying to do - you are pushing it way outside of its testing envelope.
Even then, when you do all of that, all you have is HTML which is a block rendered crappy looking thing.
Conversely, there is Flash, which has a better rendering engine, a better connectivity model..
Nix piping of text streams is ok, but ask yourself, would you really build a system entirely out of untyped strings?
Most developers innately prefer typed systems.
In unix if you want to write a script around "ls", you have to parse out all the columns and understand it by reading man pages. In monad you could get an editor to actually give you a strongly typed collection that you could easily iterate on and do what you need.
Face it, Monad is the writing on the wall. Unix needs an object oriented shell. Although, a relatational shell would probably be a lot more useful. Oh wait, Pick did that in 1985. So never mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that DRM could conceivably used to enforce free software or to even have a system where an open source environment could actually pay its developers.
For example, if I were building a project, I could pay like $5 or something and download "printf" from another developer, $5 for a cool strcpy, and so on, and stitch together solutions on a per source file basis.
With each source file protected by DRM, I could theoretically use them as needed and the authors could actually get paid. The software would be open, that is, everyone could see the source. It would be free, that is, anyone could use it or modify it, but it would not be free as in beer.
I think the OSS community needs to rethink some of its hostility to DRM, because in DRM lies the keys to getting Developers paid all of the revenue from the products, and not shareholders.
Actually it was us lunatic right wing Americans that ended slavery by invading the south. Lincoln was a REPUBLICAN.
What Carribean country did you choose?
The money you are spending for Oracle in the above case gets you some features that SQL Server flat out doesn't have. Like all things, you do have to know what you are doing with Oracle, but, if you do, you get some features that make or break a big, big application.
uber partioned indexes
uber materialized views
outstanding mvcc transaction support
SQL Server 2005 is supposed to have some of these features in it, plus the kitchen sink, but then I would expect the price to move on that.
The other thing is that with Microsoft you generally are going to spend an extra $2000 / developer for tools.
What other compiler was as ubiquitious and as free as GNU?
:-)
Do you think Linux was going to write it using Visual Studio or Borland C++?
Get real!
Linux could not exist without the Gnu compiler.
Yeah but all of that was way, way after Visicalc came out. Visicalc was why people bought Apple IIs for business purposes.
Visicalc, dot matrix printers, wire frame flight simulator, the -original- Silas Warner Castle Wolfenstein...
that was good stuff.
LDA, LDY, LDX
Cheap gas made in the USA. I can't think of anything else that could make America a happy place again!
By by middle east!
See ya! Home that islam thing works out for you! See you in a 100 years.
Maybe even a thousand.
This is great news, if it works!
Our Army is not designed to retrieve or find single individuals, it is designed to destroy countries.
If Google ever releases an operating system, it will be after they use their extremely powerful search engine leverage to drive an entirely new class of applications that make Microsoft's stuff seem quaint.
Office applications are commodities and so are operating systems. All Google has to do is keep supporting the web and they will become the primary application of it. Sitting on top of all of that personal content, all of that information, and doling it out to consumers, they can just keep marching ever forward. They have M$ over a barrel because if Microsoft ever -broke- compatibility with google, their own fan base would erupt and switch to a browser that didn't break google, crippling M$ strategy all together.
Let Microsoft have the operating system. By the time Google is done with them, a Windows that has to be priced ever and ever cheaper to compete with every other clone that can at least run google is all that Microsoft will have left.
This is competitive jiu jitsu at its finest.
No I was just pissed off when I wrote that because I was frustrated that people could not agree that the idea of getting rid of dictators as American foreign policy was a good one. When I was a kid, the left wing was all about getting rid of dictators, and now they prefer the status quo right at the same time as I've bought into the idea.
Ok batman, here's the point you miss. Science is a tool to discover and share knowledge about the real world. Therefor, it has two components, it has knowledge, and it has the real world.
For the real world to be satisfied, science must interact with it.
For the knowledge to be satisfied, it must be shareable with others.
For this reason, we combine the two requirements into a single principal - we test something about the real world, in such a way as that someone else can repeat the same test and get the same result. This way, the knowledge can be communicated, a real world result is achieved, illustrating that knowledge, and multiple people can get the same result given the same test, illustrating not only the truth of the matter but also that the communications itself is valid.
Thus, experiment against the real world is what science is about.
The whole foundation of this method occurred because once upon a time many people felt that all knowledge could be inferred, by process of logical reasoning, against the known works of the ancients. There was no need to test things themselves, because, if the logic was sound, therefor, the fact must be true. Jonathan Swift, in his famous Battle of the Books, argued this point, ultimately on the losing end. Galileo wrestled with this in his little "play" that got him into so much trouble with the Church. Newton in some ways arguably put it all together with Optiks - not only did he come up with the math to explain things - he also had the novel idea of checking his math with actual experiments. Soon, other people did that as well.
Experiment is everything. We don't teach kids to measure the temperature of boiling water just to verify that water boils at 100C. No, we do that and many other experiments because we inculcate our children with the idea that if there is a fact presented to you, then, you should be able to check it or test it yourself, otherwise, you can freely reject it.
So.. if you can't check it, or at least, trust in someone who can check it, argubably, it isn't a fact. So, we can say that yes, evolution of bacteria or fruitflies is a fact, and from that we infer that man evolved - but, that does not make the evolution of man a fact, only a good inference, because we have no test that we can repeatedly evolve a man.
There is absolutely nothing religious about this argument. As I said before, I reject so called Intelligent Design and creationism because it too cannot be tested. All I am saying is, science should not mix fact and inference. Because, there is NO FACT OF SCIENCE THAT HAS EVER BEEN WRONG. Only the inferences have been wrong. Newton wasn't somehow wrong and then corrected by Einstein. Newton was entirely right within the domain of where his math applied. Einstein was not wrong and then corrected by quantum mechanics, Einstein is a FACT within a certain domain.
It's like, in a computer program,
if (a 10) use_new_theory
there's nothing WRONG with the old theory. The fact is still perfectly FACT for a 10 that is wrong.
Maybe this is not science to you or to anyone else, but this is a lot clearer of a message than any of the mishmash (oh we got our facts wrong before) gobbleygook that you lay on the public. Science is never wrong. Only inferences about known facts are.
Adhere to that message, and maybe you can stop the flood of ignorance of the bible and national enquirer from replacing really verifiable facts.
before it is too late.
The scientific method means test and reproducable results. Anything less is not the scientific method. You are the one that wants to open the floodgates of inference and allow nonfact to pollute the knowledge base.
Now you are just mixing arguments. You can test the standard model's theory of gravity. Until that time, the cause of gravity is anybodies guess. At some point, we -will- test the standard model's theory of gravity. Until that time, it is not a fact. Just an inference.
Sorry that you can't see the difference between making stuff up and not making stuff up.
The irony is that a lot of VB6 developers are extremely pissed off about VB.NET as a migration path. If Linux actually had a VB6, a lot of VB developers would probably jump ship.
Windows NT from the get go has always had this notion of various subsystems that can sit on top of the raw OS layer. It is most common to use the Windows subsystem but there was for a time a POSIX subsystem and an OS/2 subsystem so that applications written to either could run under Windows. Over time maintenance of these subsystems was abandoned but I read somewhere that the next go around of Windows is going to have a fully compliant POSIX subsystem.
All of the OEMS bundling windows on their PC's will get the new version of Windows automatically. It's interesting that the areas where Vista is going is where Mac has gained something of a foothold and where Linux is weakest - in 3d desktops.
If the standard model says that gravity is caused by the exchange of gravitons, then we can build a big enough particle accelerator to go look for them.
I guess you are too big of a wimp to be a scientist.
>evolution and directed his agricultural ministry to >ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution.
That's actually not true. Stalin cut off the food to parts of his country friendly to the white russians to kill off political opposition. Everything else he made up to cover his tracks, even the crap about Lamarckian whatever.
And to think you posted that with a device that is arguably high technology
Yes, that is based on test, actual experiment, and reproducable results. Computers are real science, real fact.
Newsflash. The same people that don't like evolution only like physics when it can be used to attack evolution
I can't help it if they are idiots. My whole point is that the sales pitch science as a product is flawed because it presently treats inference as fact and thus, because it says its "facts are wrong", causes people to incorrectly invalidate the whole lot.
All of science can be distilled as a collection of data points. Assume that for a given domain, we have two points. Mathematically speaking, we know that there are an infinite number of functions that can satisfy those two points. A model in science attempts to predict what is in between those points and quite often that model is flawed or wrong because it guesses incorrectly.
So, when we say we know something, we need to be clear and communicate that we only those two points as fact, and that we INFER that a function of those two points which we can test. But at the end of the day, the only thing we know as fact will be those two points, and each new point we test will be just one more fact.
expect scientists to be some sort of infallible priesthood
Scientists sell themselves as that. And they aren't, and people are learning that, and they are wrongly dismissing all of it as crap.
You can show things that reproduce really fast evolving
Of course you can. And you can make new products by tinkering with genomes. That's a data point for you. But it is still an inference to say that people evolved from apes (which I think we did), not a fact.
Facts are things you can reproduce. Anything else is inference. Because science mixes the two in its public message, people throw out both, incorrectly.
Really, if you view the human enterprise of science as a sort of a brute force search algorithm of the unknown, one might think that we would teach people all sorts of random but curve fitting models so that they will think about things differently so problems can be approached in parallel from many different angles at once.
Paradoxically, to even teach everyone the same models might actually be slowing down scientific progress for new and better models.
No one is forcing you to listen
But au contraire, we have a public body that demands political action be taken in defense of one or more results that may be flat out wrong.
If you want to make actionable law out of what you do, be right, otherwise, don't bother us.
Quantum physics is speculative, but you don't seem to be throwing your computer out the window.
Don't go linking evolution to quantum physics. Quantum physics built me a computer. I've yet to see an evolutionary biologist create a planet out of dust and produce a human being.
Dead wrong.
Completely true. Name me one consumer good produced by evolution? I can name thousands produced by physics.
I can show a progression of hominid fossils leading to homo sapien sapien
And so what? Theoretically I could write a computer program that ties together every known fact of evolutionary theory and creates an infinite number of internally consistent systems around those facts. You cannot predict with your rocks, cannot repeat any steps, cannot test your ideas by repetition and cannot prove anything.
You will never amount to anything more than a glorified technician
And you'll never be a scientist, only a slave to inference. TEST. TEST. TEST. REPRODUCIBLE RESULTS. That is science.
I'm not by any stretch an ID guy or a creationist whack job, but I'm sick of people polluting science with politically motivated and untestable ideas. If you cannot test something, it is not a fact. Period, end of story.
The real point is, in the eyes of the common man, science is a brand of information, just like Walmart is a brand for stores or Nike is a brand for shoes, and the brand is taking a beating.
Here's the attitude.
"you want someone to believe human origins from a set of people that told me I would die if I smoked and ate a cheeseburger and I'm still living."
"well now basically you are just making up evolution to fit your story together. Well I can do that too. Can't test it either way, can we..."
If science can be wrong, then why trust it?
In other words, if the best a scientist can tell you today is that, he might be wrong tomorrow, why even bother listening to him?
So you can use science for real things, like physics and design of military weapons and consumer goods, but the rest of it is so much speculative nonsense.
The consequences of guessing wrong about the origin of humanity are completely immaterial to most people's lives. You can't show people evolving any more than someone else can show God making something. It's immaterial, unprovable, and so why fight over it?
Yeah you can roll out the eliptical argument that evolution is somehow necessary for medicine but most doctors are concerned with the human species, here and now, and now plants and people are related. To wit, you can get a Chem E degree and still get into Med School.
Everything that science has to offer is not just based on a logical syllogism, it is also based on scientists having a squeakier clean reputation than preachers.
You can argue falsifibility all you want, but, that does shoot science in a whole. Evolution, for all practical purposes, is not falsifiable. You can't set the initial conditions of the earth, have a control planet, wait 4 billion years, and get the same result according to a mathematical formula.
Global Warming is also practically non-falsifiable. You can't have a control earth and a current earth, in the same orbit, and then alter the CO2 level and see what happens...
Anything that is not provable by immediate experiment is thus speculation at best. It may be informed speculation, it may be internally consistent speculation, but until you demonstrate your system by corporate like repetition, you don't have science.
PS. Computer models are not experiments.
All of that would be ok, if AJAX didn't suck.
I built an AJAX like form back in the day. I used JavaScript to drive MSXML inside of a web page coupled with innerhtml to create a client side application with tabs, list views and other editing.
The problems were rife.
First off, nobody renders HTML entirely correctly and even HTML has limitations in how it sizes things. How do you draw a line in HTML? Jeez, I wonder. You might be tempted to assemble HTML tags into a kind of a windows control, but there's no architecture for the focus. Then, you have to deal with the fact that the browser itself really has no idea what you are trying to do - you are pushing it way outside of its testing envelope.
Even then, when you do all of that, all you have is HTML which is a block rendered crappy looking thing.
Conversely, there is Flash, which has a better rendering engine, a better connectivity model..
Client / Server will never die.
Nix piping of text streams is ok, but ask yourself, would you really build a system entirely out of untyped strings?
Most developers innately prefer typed systems.
In unix if you want to write a script around "ls", you have to parse out all the columns and understand it by reading man pages. In monad you could get an editor to actually give you a strongly typed collection that you could easily iterate on and do what you need.
Face it, Monad is the writing on the wall. Unix needs an object oriented shell. Although, a relatational shell would probably be a lot more useful. Oh wait, Pick did that in 1985. So never mind.